Reagan visited Bitburg Cemetery, where mostly regular German military are buried. Apparently at the time the visit was set up, his staff were not aware that some Waffen SS are buried there. But it is not an "SS Cemetery."
To understand the SS, first you have to understand that after WWI, the Treaty of Versailles limited the German army to 100,000 men. This was right after the Communist revolution in Russia, at a time when there was great political and social unrest in Germany. There were constant uprisings and attempted coups and putsches. So the way the Germans preserved order was through paramilitary organizations. The Weimar government was not allowed to do this, so political groups on the left AND on the right armed paramilitary organizations. There were more ideological right paramilitary in Germany than left, because the aristocrats and business owners were more sympathetic to the right than the left, and gave them secret aid. The Allies were aware of this, but felt that it was better that Germany did not go the way of Russia, so looked the other way.
At first, the SS was a paramilitary organization composed of men who were members of the Nazi party, true believers. They were always ready to rumble whenever the Communists or the Socialists or labor unions started a strike or threatened a putsch. This was long before Hitler took power (1919). Even after Hitler took power (1933), the Germans did not feel strong enough to repudiate the Versailles Treaty, so it was the SS (and the SA - Brownshirts) that started rounding up Communists and Socialists and union leaders and career criminals and hard-core unemployed and killing them or putting them into concentration camps. It is a little known fact that organized violence against German Jews did not occur until after the Nazis had gotten rid of Communists, Socialists, and "a-socials". The first concentration camp, Bergen-Belsen, was set up to hold political enemies, and so were the other camps set up in Germany territory. Non-Communist ethnic Germans were made to work and given attitude adjustments, and sent back into civilian life. The others were held or killed. Jews, on the other hand, were squeezed economically and forbidden to engage in public activity in the hope that they would leave Germany - their property was confiscated. People who were 1/4 Jewish and married to an ethnic German were unable to work but were not killed. Eventually, all other German Jews were killed, but that was much later (1942).
After the Nazis came into power, and it became useful to join the SS, two other branches were added to the SS structure. You could not join the regular SS after Hitler took power unless you were too young to join before. The regular SS served a political and ideological function, and took an active role in killing civilians and captured combatants after the troops rolled through an area.
The Totenkopfverbande-SS were in charge of the work camps and the death camps. Another little known fact is that the death camps were not set up until 1942, although there were mass murders of Jews and Communists. Early mass murders were done with a "Stalin shot" at the base of the skull, killing children, mothers of children, sick people, and older people. Captives who were young and strong were enslaved and worked to death.
I don't think enough has been written about the millions of people who were enslaved - estimated at 12 million.
The Waffen-SS were elite soldiers, spearheading the toughest military operations. People of German heritage, like my husband, believe that the Waffen-SS were just soldiers, but in fact at times they, like the police and the army, became part of Einsatzgruppen, killing civilians. Not just Jews, lots of Catholic Poles, and Orthodox and Communist Russians. There were also Waffen-SS troops from allied nations, mostly from Eastern Europe, people who really hated the Communists and liked Hitler, but from all over the world, including France and Great Britain. There were Waffen-SS units composed of Norwegians, Danes, Dutch, Frenchmen, Armenians, Azeris, Georgians, North Caucasians, Turkestani, Volga Tatars, Latvians, Estonians, Ukrainians, on and on.
Well, so what does this have to do with Reagan's trip to Bitburg? I liked Reagan, I voted for him, and I thought it was ok for him to visit the cemetary, but I think what he said was wrong. Yes, many of the men buried there were conscripted, but many volunteered. His statement that the men who were conscripted were "victims" of the Nazis is heedless of the real victims. What the Nazis did couldn't have happened if the majority of Germans hadn't supported them. It is true that after the Allies disarmed the Germany military, the Nazis were very powerful because of their privately armed paramilitary - hundreds of thousands, many more than the army. But it is also true that the Nazis were very popular with the German people.
If I had been Reagan, I would have given a speech that said that what the Nazis did before and during World War II was terrible, and should never happen again, but that now Germany was our ally. We should not forget the past, but the lesson of the Nazis is that it is wrong to treat people as belonging to a group, instead of individuals with rights, and that applied to Germans, too. Each man buried in the cemetary had his own story, and his own conscience, and God dealt with each of them individually, and so should we.
There is no such thing as collective guilt. A cemetary is not tainted because guilty men are buried there, and innocent men are not tainted because they are buried next to guilty men.
I hope Koizumi will say that. We honor those who did not act from base motives, and we regret those who did act from base motives. God is their judge. May it never happen again. |
